Who Wrote, and Paid For, 2.6.20

Corbet writes "LWN.net did some data mining through the kernel source repository and put together an analysis of where the patches came from. It turns out that most kernel code is contributed by people paid to do the work — but the list of companies sponsoring kernel development has a surprise or two." The article's conclusion: "The end result of all this is that a number of the widely-expressed opinions about kernel development turn out to be true. There really are thousands of developers — at least, almost 2,000 who put in at least one patch over the course of the last year. Linus Torvalds is directly responsible for a very small portion of the code which makes it into the kernel. Contemporary kernel development is spread out among a broad group of people, most of whom are paid for the work they do. Overall, the picture is of a broad-based and well-supported development community."

Comments

And somebody...

[the_greywolf]

... fucked up the libata SATA drivers. There's a deadlock that some of us have been hitting, but I have no idea what it is.

Re:BDFL

['nother poster]

Everybody pile in the flower themed VW bus and fire up the bong! We're off to Linuxstock 2.0.

Re:Interesting how much was conributed by paid dev

[TommydCat]

Often it's not easy to relay this distinction to management, as they're mostly interested with the bottom line of how much would it cost to implement x solution compared to the cost of implementing y solution. They mostly don't have time or don't care about the politics underlying either deployment unless they have received a directive that "our shop uses y solution. period."

Do you have a copy of your parents' breeding license prominently displayed or do you merely inject oppressive language about others into random statements? I fail to understand how your single disagreement with a view of another person lessens their worth as a human being.